ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER (1970) ** Hey, you! Get off
of my roof! It's a very mid-sixties film, the Dean Martin sixties
with better wallpaper, less drinks, almost even dumber suits, and
more pseudo-science. Like so much from that era it's on to something
big, it oversimplifies the case, it makes it look too easy, and it
ultimately promises too much. Films like this did manage to bring
ESP into the lexicon of pop culture, the question is whether linkage
in a milieu lacking ambiguity and multiple requisite dimensions did
anyone much good. Not that the film is particularly serious. The
music is awful, abhorrent, almost too bad to be believeable. Every
time I see Barbra Streisand taking big breaths of air I cringe
because I know what's coming. Then she gets Yves Montand doing it,
which is only funny for a second or two. Big blurry ideas
notwithstanding, there's no way this thing could have survived the
score but by riding on the psychically tangible charms of Streisand
and the visual charm of Vincente Minnelli. She maintains things to a
level at which Jack Nicholson, doing yet another hippie variation, de
jure incestuous slacker med student, is as reasonably appropriate as
he ever is anywhere else. Bob Newhart's psychiatry has nothing on
Montand's, so he sticks to sociopolitical pencil marking of the type
that...of the type that Alan Jay Lerner was desperately trying to
save a generation from, ultimately with only a smattering of success.
Use symbols, use science, use lies! Just guide your readers away
from the gelid spotlight that freezes youthful idealism until it
blows away in the winds of a societal non-duality that could never
have originated in cognitive conspiracy because no one would have
backed it. Heed my cry, before you turn into Mabel Albertson (here.
or in "Bewitched").
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